Of all the “American Idol” vets to land on their feet in the upper echelons of the pop charts, Carrie Underwood’s career feels most secure. There’s no weird power struggles with her label, as with Kelly Clarkson; her audience is broader than Clay Aiken’s mom battalions; and she doesn’t have Chris Daughtry’s fixation on adenoidal fourth-wave grunge to ride out.

Instead, Underwood is almost a lab creation designed to perfectly embody modern Nashville values: an earnest, homespun yet media-savvy singer with pop smarts, a reliably giant voice and an eye on potential crossover appeal. She got there through the machinations of reality TV, but at this point “Idol” saturation is so culturally universal that no cowgirl even blinks when CMT made its own knockoff version. 

Underwood does a lot of traditional things right, and it’s no accident that she transcended her “Idol” fame into a much bigger career. Her voice and song selections tread into a vague genre-less anxious adolescent territory where every emotion is heightened to ecstatic extremes, and her first instincts are always more toward pop-star moves than the heavy lineage of country singers before her.

 ”Jesus, Take the Wheel” is an expert bit of Christian pop that gets its emotional heft from the universally harrowing situation of an averted car crash. “Get Out of This Town” is pure teenage escapism, and “Before He Cheats” is a smoldering poison pen letter that nods to Patsy, Loretta and every other scorned woman getting her comeuppance. 

Underwood’s sheer will to be meaningful and accessible ties all this together, and even an awkward cover of “Paradise City” (Carrie, everyone knows you cover only Guns ballads, not their rockers) proved how important the act of crossing over is for her. I wouldn’t suggest it for every aspirant country star, but it’s a  great tactic for getting famous and staying there.

– August Brown 

Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times

First it was Tim McGraw with “Back When” (which he just bounced through on the Tundra Mane Stage), and more recently Alan Jackson with “I Still Like Bologna.” Two good old boy singers pining for the good old days when they could get a good old bologna sandwich.So what’s up with the deli guys in grocery stores down South? My neighborhood Ralphs still stocks Oscar Meyer and Wonderbread.

Twelve feet to my right, a single plastic beer cup rolls across the grass, pushed along by a deliciously cool evening breeze. That’s news because it’s such an anomaly here on the grounds of the Empire Polo Field where Stagecoach is about an hour from coming to a close. The grounds aren’t just clean, they’re insanely tidy. And this after three days and a total attendance close to 120,000, some 20% to 25% higher than last year’s inaugural Stagecoach festival.

At 10:40 p.m. there’s just a sprinkling of litter. A minor miracle. And maybe not even that minor.

– Randy Lewis

If there’s a single performance that best represents the soul of Stagecoach 2008, it’d be the one George Jones just wrapped up at the Palomino stage.

The 76-year-old country icon struggled a bit with a vocal rasp, but it may have actually heightened the impact of his performance for an absolutely rapturous crowd of a couple of thousand onlookers. It had none of the glass-shattering lung power of Carrie Underwood’s performance going on simultaneously at the opposite end of the Stagecoach grounds. But unlike the “American Idol” 2005 champ, Jones emphasized nuance and lyrics lived from the inside out. (Does anybody besides me find it odd that the biggest, loudest word in one of her recent hits is “small”?)“Choices,” Jones’ song about coming to terms with one’s shortcomings, had a woman next to me sobbing. “That song was played at my dad’s funeral,” she explained. Hard to imagine songs from the festival big guns being chosen as anyone’s final statement to the world. Jones, though, recognizes the vital role a country song can play in allowing the listener to face those pesky demons within. “They don’t play the drinkin’ songs anymore,” he quipped at one point. “And the cheatin’ songs, you don’t hear those on the radio, so we have to play them for you.”

Total turnout for Stagecoach this year was 120,000 over three days. Any fears that this festival might turn out to be all hat and no cattle have been permanently allayed.

– August Brown

Texas country-rocker Jack Ingram had the best love song of the weekend Sunday night. Aptly titled “Love You,” it’s a delicate ode to a cheating girlfriend, his rusty pickup and his fondness for the “only four letter word that will do” in such times. Here’s a hint — the word’s not “love.” It’s also not printable in a family-friendly music blog. And it accurately sums up the kind of craftsman insouciance that Ingram has rode to some commendable chart success on his 2007 album “This Is It.” I wouldn’t want him whispering such tender-hearted pillow talk in my ear, but it’s a great prompt to hit the drink tent and get bitter about some exes.

– August Brown 

Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images

Gretchen Wilson covered Journey’s “Separate Ways” on the Mane Stage a few minutes ago, and in an instant I realized why she so immediately drew a line between herself and the dial-a-bleach-job sirens hustling the Nashville circuit. Wilson is a “redneck woman” through and through, but any actual redneck will tell you that a classic-rock education is just as important as knowing your Willie or Waylon. Wilson was a bartender before breaking into the biz, and from the full-throated sass of her voice to her choice of a Les Paul onstage, this is a lady who has cued many a last call with the words “Just a city boy, born and raised in south Detroit.”

I admired the spunk of her first couple of albums, but the cuts she played off her forthcoming fourth record seemed a bit pandering (particularly “Trucker Man,” which amounted to a list of trucker traits such as elbow sunburns over lukewarm rock riffs). But it was great to see her gesture at the era of spandex and pyrotechnics in her set before a monolithically Nashville audience. She’s a realist and Perry’s a dreamer, but both singers trade in giant ideals about America, love and synth solos.

– August Brown

Photo by Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Stagecoach’s attempt to showcase country influences in nonwhite cultures (see Abigail Washburn’s Chinese folk last year, or Star de Azlan’s Tejano ballads this year) is one of its most exciting traits. But one community that it hadn’t really touched on until recently was African American folk music as a major part of modern country’s DNA.  From the banjo’s earliest incarnations as a traditional African instrument to the stadium-blues guitar licks that define contemporary country-rock, black culture’s influence on country is one of the genre’s most underexplored and volatile angles.

The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an all-black folk trio from North Carolina who, in addition to being fiendishly talented banjo, fiddle and kazoo players, know the complicated web of Americana’s social history back-to-front. Their fiery takes on standards such as “Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind” and “Cornbread and Butterbeans” are top-shelf, but their real legwork happens between the staff bars. Carolina Chocolate Drops’ existence is a needed revisionist take on music history and a reclaiming of American folk from a racially troubled past. They learned many of their tunes from recordings from hillbilly bands that, in short, might not have appreciated their versions. Remembering all the girls today in Confederate flag bikinis and one burly male fan wearing a stars-and-bars T-shirt that read, ”You wear your ‘X’ and I’ll wear mine,” I can only imagine the kind of pressure and frayed nerves that are inherent in the Drops’ career in the genre.

They subtly acknowledge this schism onstage, but the message is forcefully implicit: American folk, like American identity, is the sum of its disparate cultures, and while the Drops’ music is an exhilarating listen, their living history lesson is all the more necessary in modern country.  

– August Brown

Photo by Jimmy Williams

Wynonna Judd nailed it last night when she said country music is “real stories about real peole.”

Too many songs on country radio today come across like weak approximations of real life. But not at this moment on the Palomino Stage, where Texas songwriter Billy Joe Shaver is rocking the crowd with Lone Star State roadhouse country blues.

Shaver’s been through more than enough to wipe that broad smile off his craggy face. He divorced his wife twice but married her a third time before she died of cancer about a decade ago. And his son Eddy died of a drug overdose at the turn of the millennium.

But that, evidently, is just part of real life, the subject he’s mined for four decades in songs that have been recorded by Elvis, Bob Dylan, Waylon Jennings and countless others.

It’s hard to think of a portrait of a couple’s redemption more achingly beautiful, or more true to life, than the one he just sang, “When the Fallen Angels Fly”:

“There’s a story in the Bible

about the eagle growing old.

How it grows new sets of feathers

then becomes both young and strong

then it spreads its mighty wingspan

out across the open sky.

We will have the wings of angels

when the fallen angels fly.”

– Randy Lewis

Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times

What’s up with every other band at Stagecoach reminding us from the stage that their single is currently on the charts? We just heard Whiskey Falls graciously thank fans for pushing them into the country top-40; Chuck Wicks reminded us of the airwave prowess of his single “Stealing Cinderella,” and yesterday Taylor Swift very earnestly thanked the kids for vaulting much of her album into the top 10. This gift for self-promotion only further proves that country stars and rappers have much, much more in common than you might think.

-August Brown